A Framework for Development and Communication of Absolute Social Sustainability Assessment Methods

For decades, the conversation about saving the planet has focused heavily on the environment. Scientists have developed sophisticated ways to measure how much pollution a factory emits or how much carbon a product generates, comparing these numbers against the Earth's physical limits. We know, for instance, that there is a maximum amount of greenhouse gases the atmosphere can hold before the climate becomes unstable. This approach, known as absolute environmental sustainability, asks a simple but vital question: are we staying within the safe boundaries of our planet? Yet, while we have learned to measure our impact on the soil, air, and water, we have struggled to apply the same rigorous logic to human society. We lack a clear method to determine if a company's actions are doing enough to solve global social problems like hunger, lack of clean water, or unsafe housing. It is one thing to say a factory is not polluting a river; it is another to ask if that factory is actively helping to ensure the people living nearby have enough to eat.

This gap in our understanding is the focus of a new study by Hendrik Brosche, a researcher at the University of Hamburg. The paper proposes a new framework to bring the clarity of environmental limits into the messy, complex world of social justice. The goal is to create a system where we can calculate exactly how much a specific company or product should contribute to solving global social challenges. Instead of just checking if a business is following the law or treating workers politely, this new method asks whether the business is doing its fair share to close the gap between the current state of the world and a world where everyone has their basic needs met. By translating broad global goals into specific, measurable targets for individual organizations, the study offers a way to move from vague promises of "corporate responsibility" to concrete, science-based targets for social well-being.

The core of this new framework is a shift in perspective. Traditional methods for assessing social impacts often look at how a company performs relative to its peers or legal requirements. This new approach, called Absolute Social Sustainability Assessment, looks at the company's performance relative to the actual needs of the world. It starts by defining what a "social foundation" looks like—the minimum conditions required for a dignified life, such as access to food, clean water, sanitation, and safety. The researchers then calculate the "gap" between where the world stands today and where it needs to be to meet these foundations. The crucial innovation is figuring out how to split that gap among the world's actors. Just as we might divide the remaining safe amount of carbon emissions among countries, this framework proposes dividing the work needed to solve social problems among companies, governments, and individuals.

To make this work, the study outlines a step-by-step process that mirrors how environmental scientists work, but with necessary adjustments for the social realm. First, you define the activity you are looking at, such as the entire life cycle of a product or the operations of a specific company. Next, you measure the social pressure that activity creates. Unlike environmental impacts, which often have clear cause-and-effect chains, social impacts are harder to trace. A factory might pay low wages, but proving exactly how that leads to a specific social outcome requires careful mapping. The framework acknowledges this difficulty and suggests that sometimes we must measure the potential for harm rather than just the harm itself. The third step is the most critical: comparing the activity's performance against a specific threshold. This threshold is not a fixed number like "zero emissions," but a calculated share of the global social gap that the activity is responsible for filling.

The study introduces a "responsibility-sharing logic" to determine what that share should be. This is where the method becomes deeply practical and transparent. The researchers argue that we must make our assumptions about who is responsible for what completely clear. For example, one could assume that governments should solve most social problems, leaving companies with a small role. Alternatively, one could assume that large, wealthy corporations have a greater duty to contribute based on their ability to pay. The framework does not pick a single "correct" answer but provides a tool to test different scenarios. By explicitly stating these assumptions, companies and researchers can see how the results change depending on who is expected to do the heavy lifting.

To show how this works in the real world, the author applied their framework to three very different companies: Apple, a massive technology giant based in the United States; Volkswagen, a large car manufacturer in Germany; and Bank Islam Malaysia, a financial institution in Southeast Asia. They looked at six major global social challenges: undernourishment, lack of safe drinking water, poor sanitation, slum living, lack of electricity, and victims of intentional homicide. Using data from 2022, they calculated the total number of people affected by each issue globally. Then, they assigned a portion of that total to these companies based on their financial size and a specific rule for sharing responsibility.

The results were striking and varied widely depending on the assumptions made. When the researchers assumed that listed companies globally were responsible for 100% of the social gap, the numbers were enormous. Under this scenario, Apple was allocated a responsibility to help approximately 21 million people who are currently undernourished. For the same company, the target was to help 67 million people gain access to safely managed drinking water and 107 million people gain access to improved sanitation. In contrast, under the same 100% responsibility scenario, Volkswagen was allocated a share corresponding to helping about 262,000 people with undernourishment, and Bank Islam Malaysia was allocated a share for about 11,000 people. These numbers were not random; they were directly tied to the companies' financial valuations and the specific scale of the global problems.

The study also explored what happens if we change the rules of responsibility. If we assume that companies are only responsible for 10% of the global social gap, with governments and other actors taking the rest, the targets for these companies drop proportionally. However, the relative differences between the companies remained. Apple, being the largest, still carried the heaviest load, while the smaller bank carried a much lighter one. The researchers also tested two different ways of measuring a company's size: market value (the price of its shares) and enterprise value (which includes debt and other factors). This choice changed the specific numbers slightly, showing that the method is sensitive to how we define "size" and "ability to pay." For instance, under one valuation method, Apple's required contribution for undernourishment dropped from 21 million people to about 15 million, while Volkswagen's share increased.

A key finding of the paper is that achieving these targets requires more than just avoiding harm. In the environmental world, a company can often be considered "sustainable" if it simply stops polluting. In the social world, simply not hurting people is not enough. The framework suggests that to meet these absolute thresholds, companies must actively generate positive impacts. This could mean paying fair wages, investing in community infrastructure, or creating products that directly solve a social need. The study notes that for some companies, the gap between what they can do through their normal operations and what they are required to do is so large that they must look beyond their own walls. They might need to invest in partnerships or capacity-building projects to help solve the problems they are responsible for.

The researchers are careful to point out that this is a new way of thinking, not a finished product. The framework is a tool for development and communication, designed to help researchers and companies structure their thinking. It highlights that we currently lack the detailed data and clear cause-and-effect maps that we have for environmental issues. We do not yet fully understand how a specific business decision translates into a specific social outcome for a specific group of people. The study suggests that future work must focus on building these connections and refining the data. It also emphasizes that the numbers generated in the example are not fixed laws of nature but the result of specific choices about how to share responsibility. If we change the assumption about who is responsible, the numbers change.

Ultimately, the paper offers a path forward for a more honest and rigorous conversation about corporate responsibility. By moving away from vague ideals and toward quantified, absolute targets, it forces a confrontation with the scale of global social challenges. It shows that for the world's largest companies, the task of achieving social sustainability is not a minor side project but a massive undertaking that could involve helping tens of millions of people. The framework does not solve the problem of poverty or inequality on its own, but it provides a clear, transparent method for defining what "doing enough" actually looks like. It invites companies to stop asking if they are the best in their class and start asking if they are doing their part to build a world where everyone has a foundation for a dignified life.